Last year, we gave Album Of The Week to Blues Funeral, the last album from the wizened and liquor-throated former Screaming Trees frontman Mark Lanegan. Later this year, he’ll follow it up with a (very different) new album called Imitations. Here’s what Lanegan says about it:

“When I was a kid in the late sixties and early seventies, my parents and their friends would play the records of Andy Williams, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and Perry Como, music with string arrangements and men singing songs that sounded sad whether they were or not. At home my folks were also listening to country music, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, George Jones and Vern Gosdin were some of our favorites. For a long time I’ve wanted to make a record that gave me the same feeling those old records did, using some of the same tunes I loved as a kid and some that I’ve loved as I have gotten older. This record is it. Imitations.”

True to Lanegan’s word, first single “I’m Not The Loving Kind” uses his weary voice on a classically arranged countrypolitan weeper, and it sounds beautiful. Listen and check out the tracklist below.

TRACKLIST:
1. “Flatlands”
2. “She’s Gone”
3. “Deepest Shade”
4. “You Only Live Twice”
5. “Pretty Colors”
6. “Brompton Oratory”
7. “Solitaire”
8. “Mack The Knife”
9. “Im Not The Loving Kind”
10. “Lonely Street”
11. “Elégie Funèbre”
12. “Autumn Leaves”

Imitations is out 9/17 on Vagrant.